No cite but I believe that you can get immunity for everything except murder.
If this is the case,and I’m no expert,he most definitely wouldn’t own up to any killings that he might or might not have committed.
Jimmy (DeNiro character) and Paulie (Paul Sorvino) are the 2 main characters who died in prison.
Henry says Tommy got whacked for killing Batts and “other things” , 1 of the other things was he tried to rape Karen.
Right, but the bigger other thing is that he killed Ronald Jerothe. Gotti really wouldn’t care if DiSimone raped Karen Hill.
The attempted rape of Karen was what made Paulie tell the Gambinos that Tommy killed Batts and Jerothe. That’s because Karen was having an affair with Paulie.
Maybe the Gambinos would have found out eventually who killed those 2 if Paulie did not tell them but maybe not.
Oh goodness. I’m not even sure I could justify purchasing that as pure kitsch. It makes serial killers look talented.
Despite their gory ends, I still think some people watch Goodfellas and think the mob is all glam. Granted, these are probably the same oafs who think Mad Men’s about the good old days, use Swingers pick-up lines and quote Boiler Room in sales meetings. IMHO, Donnie Brasco got the pathetic schlubbiness of the mob down better, though overall it was much less entertaining.
Even if that were not the case.
Henry Hill is a con man. That’s his life. That’s what he did. He told people he was basically an OK guy and got people to trust him and think he was an OK guy. He even tells you this, several times, in the bio. The one lesson you should take away from it is that you don’t believe anything he says. There are lots of good commercial reasons for this (you wouldn’t be as interested in it or as willing to self-identify with a truly cold-blooded killer, if that were the case), but I suspect he couldn’t possibly act otherwise.
So don’t believe Hill, on general principles. He might have been a calculating Machiavelli, or an amoral killer, or a psychopath, or a Regular Guy who manipulated circumstances as best he could. The point is you can’t rely on his own testimony to decide which of these he was, as he himself obliquely tells you. If he whacked a lot of guys, he wouldn’t tell you.
Speaking of Donnie Brasco, the FBI guy who was Donnie was able to hang out with the mob for a number of years without killing someone so maybe it’s not that hard. He only gave up his undercover role when he was asked to whack somebody.
I’m with you. I thought it was overrated in 1990, and now it’s just gotten insane. It is, as others point out, a well shot, well acted movie. The only problems with it’s lack of an interesting or original plot and one dimensional characters who failed completely to engage me. If you can put aside those minor concerns, it works as a mob movie.
Donnie Brasco is also really good at showing this side of the life.
bolding mine
Heh… this totally made me think of Family Guy’s speech on the Godfather.
Well, I suppose I meant that at least DeNiro and Pesci went at least one step to far towards ham. They wound up looking like caricatures rather than characters to me. Meanwhile, the movie seemed like the director thought if he distracted me with enough “cool” I’d forget that. But I wasn’t impressed and Hill in particular was a deeply unpleasant character. I still can’t figure out if they wanted me to ignore that or embrace it, but either way I wasn’t buying.
So? It is the mafia we’re talking about here. You want him to be glorified, as already said, go watch The Godfather. 
You can’t just watch and see the events that happen to him now that he’s in the lifestyle he idolized since he was a kid?
You mistake what I said for what somebody else said. He an unpleasant, shallow character with neither head nor heart. He was a pathetic puppet blindly following his programming. That’s none too interesting. He’s heartless and seemingly incapable of independant thought. Frankly, his moron wife seemed like a much more fascinating character. Her, I would want a movie about.
No, because that’s the problem. The events largely happen to him. He just goes along with whatever is happening or promises the quick buck right now. He’s only competent when under the immediate direction of another, and falls into exactly the stupid mistakes that everybody told him he would get into long ago. Plus, there was the self-serving nature of the memoir, which I read as a justification for his ratting. I don’t really care if people squeal on criminal organizations, but the fact that he apparently thought he needed to make himself look a victim is rather unpleasant.
That’s an interesting thing about Goodfellas. For the most part events happen to and around Henry Hill. He doesn’t wack anyone. In fact Jimmy asking him to go down to Florida to wack some witness was a tip off that something was up. The one enterprise he tries to start up himself blows up in his face because he surrounded himself with morons.
Well, I guess that’s where we disagree. I don’t think it’s even remotely interesting.
See my statement earlier. This is based on Hill’s own account of his activities, and he’s an admitted con-man and scam artist who’s trying to make himself likeable. If he did whack anyone, he wouldn’t tell you about it. If he did instigate anything really nasty, it wouldn’t be in his interest to let you know. I suspect his apparently passive role in much of this is the result of a deliberate attempt to make himself not seem as mean, violent, and (let’s face it) as crazy as he makes his companions appear to be. He’s the ultimate Unreliable Witness.
Hill does admit to being a major drug dealer , that’s not very likeable to many people. And of course he was cheating on his wife for many years.
I believe if the cops had evidence he did whack someone he would have done time before going into the witness protection program.
Dealing drugs isn’t the same as killing someone. Ditto cheating on your wife. People know he was a criminal – he just wants to be known as a nice criminal.
Just because the police don’t have evidence that he killed someone doesn’t mean that he didn’t, or wouldn’t say so (if he wasn’t trying to sell himself). I do think that there were no obvious indications that he killed someone or did something unsavory, because Nicholas Pileggi was writing the book, after all, not Hill, and if he found out there was nothing to stop him putting it in.
It’s not that I think Hill is a Master Criminal who can cover everything up. It’s entirely possible that he didn’t actually do anything that would make him unlikeable. but it seems very possible that, in a long life of crime he did some things he wouldn’t want people to know, and that he was careful enough to conceal, and lucky enough not to get found out about. And those things he’s probably keeping under wraps.
Since he was there when Billy Batts was killed he could have possibly been charged for that murder - he admitted that whole story. BTW, the movie changed that story a little bit. Batts was not killed the same night he was busting Tommy’s balls about the shine box - he was killed a week later.
Sammy the Bull admitted to at least 19 murders and he served less than 10 years because he testified against Gotti and others. He even ordered the killing of his wife’s brother.
The first half of the movie is about the mystique of the Mafia and how someone can get caught up in what appears to be wealth, power, and a feeling of camaraderie. The second half is about the reality, about how you spend all your time worrying your best friend will kill you.